


Fairy Tale

by semele



Category: The 100 (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-13
Updated: 2015-01-13
Packaged: 2018-03-07 08:44:51
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 814
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3168686
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/semele/pseuds/semele
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It didn't help.</p><p>(Spoilers up to 2x08; goes slightly AU after 1x11.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	Fairy Tale

**Author's Note:**

  * For [akzseinga](https://archiveofourown.org/users/akzseinga/gifts).



> Prompt: Your mother did not raise you with a wolf in your chest so you could howl over losing a man, requested by akzseinga for her birthday

It didn't help.

(Finn, she can't help but remember, had smaller hands and smoother, softer hair. There was a spot low on his back that she always made a point of touching when she undressed him, and it made him arch his back like a cat, relaxed and content, so incredibly pleased with himself.

“I love you,” he'd say softly, and Raven smiled as she let him stroke her hair. It was very fairy-tale of them.)

***

As days go by, she tries to make herself think about Bellamy. It was a flop of a night, she reminds herself with a hint of mockery; fumbly, quick and graceless, and so refreshingly loveless it seems almost unreal. It's a good thing to dwell on as she works, bullet after bullet after bullet.

(“I'm sorry,” he said later in the woods, but she didn't buy it. She very much needed to not buy it.)

Oh, what does it matter? They'll all be dead in a week anyway.

Bellamy doesn't look so hot when she shows up in his tent again. His hands are slow and clumsy as he tries to fix his right shoe, and he seems stretched too thin; worried, gray, and chronically irritated.

“Oh, it's you,” he says flatly when he sees her. “What do you want?”

She turns around and leaves without a sound, and he rushes after her, or maybe he doesn't, whatever. He would look very stupid if he did, barefoot and messy, and with a single torn shoe clutched in his hand like a gun. 

Raven doesn't have time for any of this. This, whatever it is, isn't even her scenery – she understands love, and work, and friendship, a lot of struggle made bearable by just a little bit of fairy tale. She deserves better; better than Finn's cheating, and better than this twisted pastiche, a tent, a boy, and a shoe, and it's not even like the sex was worth it.

She gets shot the very next day.

***

This is how it goes: Finn holds her hand as Abby cuts into her spine, and Raven howls like a wolf, weak, and wounded, and deadly. Now she knows that it's bullshit that you can transcend pain. She doesn't transcend shit; she screams until she passes out, and when she wakes up, she has a numb leg, and a bleeding bruise the size of her head. For some reason it hurts even worse than getting shot, and working for hours with a hole in her back, but Finn is with her, and it makes things a little better, she thinks. 

Or maybe he doesn't make anything better, and she's just being childish, childish and clingy, and downright dumb. Truth is, she doesn't give a fuck. She is weary of always being smart, and when Bellamy comes to her for guns he needs to go after Finn, it takes all the strength she has to look him in the eye, because his voice is ringing in her ears, loud and haunting as ever.

“What else you got in that head of yours?”

(Truth is, there is too much Raven in Raven right now for her to reach anywhere beyond her broken Raven body. She fights to sit up as Finn leads Bellamy out of the camp, and fights to walk as Bellamy leads Finn back in. This time, there is blood on his hands, but it's not hers, so she doesn't care. She knows this can't be her life, because even her life isn't such a brutal and bloody pastiche, so she braces herself, and waits for the world to gets its shit together, and settle itself around her and Finn. She wants him, she decides somewhere between screws and hinges of her brace, because fuck it. She is alone on the ground, hurting, and useless, and shaky, and she wants her brother, lover, whatever. It might not be good enough, this thing they have, but it's all she has.)

***

Truth is, Finn dies with her knife in his gut in an act of bloody fairy tale justice, and when Raven hits the ground, Bellamy's arms surrounding her like a solid, useless shield, there is very little Raven left in her hollow Raven head.

When everything is over, Bellamy goes with her to her tent, and it's inappropriate, the way she scratches, howls, and clings. Both of his shoes are on his feet, but the right one is sporting a big, wet hole that makes splashy noises whenever he steps, how grotesque, in a way that makes her wish he'd dance around even more for her amusement, because this can't be real.

She should screw him here and now, but the sex wasn't so good, she remembers, so she lets him hold her as she falls asleep, her mind cloudy with exhaustion.

In the morning, she steals the shoe before he wakes up.


End file.
